Sunday, 1 November 2009

Review of Gary Bunt's "iMuslims"

Ziauddin Sardar has written a review of Gary Bunts book iMuslims in the Independent (Friday, 7 August 2009) which discusses the role and influence of Muslims on the internet:

"The internet has rewired Islam. The web is now at the core of all Muslim communities and performs a central role in Islamic expression. It is being used to reinterpret Islam; and Muslims themselves are being transformed.

But not everything is new. This "Cyber Islamic Environment" has strong historic resonance. The new networks are not unlike traditional networks during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, when religious knowledge evolved as an open-source system. Just like Wikipedia, experts and ordinary people collaborated to develop a consensus on Islamic knowledge.

For example, the scholarship that developed around the collection of sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, hadith, was a collaborative effort. Scholars travelled far and wide, making connections with networks around centres of knowledge, both to collect and transmit versions of hadith. The criteria for evaluating hadith were also a product of collaborative efforts. This "open-source Islamic scholarship", Bunt writes, "was subjected to limitations and restrictions over time". It has now been rediscovered by an internet-savvy generation.

The strongest and most authoritative Islamic voice in cyberspace, Bunt says, is the Qur'an. Online translations and commentaries provide unrestricted access. Most religious institutions, such as Egypt's al-Azhar and Iran's Qom, have a strong web presence with designated sheikhs and ayatollahs responding across the net to petitioners."